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Aligning the EU Budget to the Europe 2020 Competitiveness and Growth Objectives

The economic crisis has exposed the weaknesses of the European economies and emphasised the needs to boost competitiveness of the private sector by means of further economic integration and growth enhancing policies. Climate change has made the world aware that energy production and use needs a fundamental restructuring towards low carbon solutions. Competitiveness, employment and energy security are Europe’s central challenges. Globally, increased need to support developing countries and the looming prospect of repeated food crisis are also calling for a larger and financially important role for the EU. In those areas the EU budget can make a fundamental contribution.

The adoption of the Europe 2020-strategy outlines integrated policy priorities in the current decade and the strategy constitutes the prime reference for the recreation of European jobs and welfare in a period where emerging economies are catching up and even overtaking the European economy in field formerly dominated by Europe, the USA and Japan.

The Commission estimates that if the Europe 2020 targets are achieved, the result could be an extra 4 per cent on EU GDP and 5.6 million new jobs by 2020. The EU budget should be designed as one of the key instruments to help deliver the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth through its potential influence as coordination and leverage instruments which can deliver important economies of scale.

The objective of the Task Force is to influence the policy debate by:
• Creating a group of political and corporate stakeholders, who are willing to campaign on “making the EU budget competitiveness and growth oriented”;
• Undertaking outreach activities in Brussels and in particular the European Institutions to firmly establish an understanding of the conditions required for the EU budget to support the Europe 2020 strategy;
• Thinking through the analytical and political challenges related to making the budget ‘competitiveness and growth oriented taking into account Europe’s social and environmental sustainability’;
• Giving guidance on a direction in the longer term and produce a list of realistic and specific reforms aimed at the next financial perspectives, outlining what a growth oriented EU budget would look like.